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Connections

The Aserto Control Plane manages connections to external systems that are the source of Aserto artifacts.

System and User connections​

There are two types of connections: system connections and user connections.

A system connection stores the connection between the tenant and other Aserto services, such as the policy registry and the hosted authorizer.

A user connection is one that the user has established between Aserto and one of their services. There are three types of user connections currently supported:

  • IDP (identity provider): this is a read-only connection between Aserto and an Identity Provider. Currently, Auth0, AWS Cognito, Entra (Azure AD), Google Workspace, LDAP and Okta are supported.
  • SCC (source code control): this is a connection between Aserto and a source code control system. Currently, GitHub and GitLab are supported.
  • POLICY_REGISTRY (policy registry): this is a connection between Aserto and a policy registry. Currently, only GitHub Container Registry (GHCR) and the Aserto Container Registry (APCR) are supported.

Providers​

A connection is an instance of a provider. Aserto supports a few providers, and this is a key extensibility point for the architecture.

Provider kinds​

Aserto supports a few kinds of providers:

  • IDP: identity providers
  • SCC: source code control systems
  • POLICY_REGISTRY: a policy registry provider
  • AUTHORIZER: an authorizer provider

Every provider is an instance of a provider kind, and has expected semantics based on that provider kind. For example, a SCC provider must support enumerating organizations, repositories, and cloning a new repository based on an existing template repository.

Creating connections​

Connections are created using the Aserto Console. Currently, a tenant member can connect a source code control system (e.g. GitHub) as the source of Policy repositories, and an identity provider (e.g. Auth0) as the source of users and user properties that are managed by the Aserto directory.